At number ten the small town of Scary, West Virginia. Having the main street called Scary Road wasn’t frightening enough, so they named another street Big Scary Road!

At numbers nine and eight, we can just about make up the popular Halloween activity, by visiting Trickum Road and Treat Mountain Road, both in rural Georgia. Sadly they don’t intersect.

In the Netherlands we have a town named after a popular Halloween costume – Monster – which is number seven on our list. I’m not sure if it’s real graffiti, a real monster, or just an artifact of Google’s blurring efforts, but the town sign appears to have a ghoulish claw attached to the letter M!

Number six continues our monster theme. A touch of green face paint and a fake plastic bolt through the neck brings us to the tiny village of Frankenstein, Missouri.

Wikipedia claims that the town wasn’t actually named after Mary Shelley’s novel or its characters, but for a Gottfried Franken who donated land for the construction of a Church.

At number five we have one of the more popular decorations for Halloween parties – Spiderweb, South Carolina.

At numbers four and three we have a ghostly sound and a startled response – Boo, Sweden and Eek, Alaska.

Many children dress as pointy-hatted, wart-riddled old hags for Halloween, so (bending the rules slightly to include bodies of water as well as towns) at number two we have Witch Lake, Michigan.

We provide this handy graphic to help you understand how it got its name! Note the bonus Halloween content with Bat Lake just to the north-west!

No Halloween celebration would be complete without a gourd-like squash of the genus Cucurbita, carved into a gruesome face and lit from within by a candle. So tied for number one we have a pair of communities called Pumkpintown – one in South Carolina, the other in Tennessee.

Happy Halloween from all of us at Google Sightseeing! If you know of other Halloween-named towns, please post them in the comments.

Locations: Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Netherlands, South Carolina, Sweden, Tennessee, West Virginia / Categories: Street Views, Weirdness

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The countries receiving updated imagery are Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Romania, South Africa, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Additionally, there is brand new coverage of two of Britain’s Crown Dependencies, the Isle of Man, and Jersey.

Peel Castle, Isle of Man

Mont Orgueil, Jersey

Of particular interest in the United States, brand new imagery has been added throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego, taking in sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Staples Center, and USS Midway which are now shown in stunning high-resolution.

What can you find in the new imagery? Send us your finds via our suggestion form, or on Twitter, and we’ll post a roundup later in the week of your best finds!

Read the full story at the Google Latlong blog.

Locations: Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, North America, Norway, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom / Categories: Street Views

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Gammelstad’s focal point is a stone Church that was first built in the 15th century.

The surrounding town consists of hundreds of small wooden cottages, many of which date back to the 18th century. Lots of these cottages are uniform in size and shape, but regardless of their form, they are nearly all painted a rather fetching shade of red. Of the original 500 or so cottages, today around 400 remain.

Church towns and villages were once commonplace throughout Scandinavia, allowing farmers and other residents of distant rural areas to travel to their Church and stay overnight before attending Sunday services. Church towns eventually became obsolete as transportation options improved – indeed Street View shows us that the town is well served by buses these days!

The majority of the cottages are privately owned, with many people visiting only for important religious festivals. Street View shows many cottages closed up with shutters, but there are signs here that some at least appear to be occupied on an ongoing basis.

Some other notable buildings – all very near the Church – include:

The Parish Storehouse where tithes of produce were collected

The Parish Hall, which has had various uses over the centuries, including courthouse, jail and (today) a cafe

An inn / restaurant

Gammelstad was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, and has a number of tourist attractions, including a historic market, museum, and guesthouse, and of course you can also visit one of the cottages.

The Gammelstad town website has a wealth of information for visitors and residents, including the recipe for cooking up a batch of the official paint!

Locations: Sweden / Categories: Buildings, Street Views, World Heritage Sites

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Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve was member of a family of prominent astronomers¹. While the majority of his work involved the study of astronomical bodies, he also turned his attentions to geodetic surveying – the measurement and representation of the Earth.

He studied at the University of Tartu in Estonia and established the first of his triangulation points at the observatory in that town. There is a large stone monument just to the north of the main building.

Further locations were established roughly along a meridian line originating in Tartu and spanning almost 3,000km. The majority of the sites were hill- or mountain-tops, or other prominent points of land. This wide range of triangulation points would have allowed accurate calculations of the size of the whole planet.

The 265 locations were – at that time – in only two countries: the Sweden-Norway Union and the Russian Empire. The intervening years have seen these two disintegrate into ten separate countries. Most of the 34 locations which make up the World Heritage Site are marked by monuments of some kind. The northernmost point is in Hammerfest, Norway. It’s a low-res area on Google maps, but the monument is worth a closer look.

In Tornio, northern Finland, the quite beautiful Alatornion kirkko was the only building – other than the Tartu observatory – that was used as a triangulation point.

Further south in Finland, Aavasaksa is a small hill also used as a triangulation point. At the top there is a hunting lodge used by leaders of the Russian Empire. It is currently in use as a cafe and there is a monument consisting of a large boulder surrounded by an iron representation of the globe.

In the Baltic Sea, points were located on two islands: the highest point on Finland’s Mustaviiri, and a hill-top on Russia’s Gogland.

The village of Jekabpils in Latvia has a park named after Struve at the location of the triangulation point.

The majority of points to the south of the Arc – in Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine – are marked by small monuments, in rural areas covered by low-res imagery, so there’s not much to see on satellite images. If you’re curious, you can find many of the locations marked on this Google Maps interface.

The southernmost monument is in what appears to be a housing development in the Ukrainian town of Stara Nekrasivka,

Wikipedia has a bit more information, while the Wikidot entry has a detailed list and map of all 265 triangulation points, along with photos of many of the World Heritage locations.

Locations: Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Street Views, Structures, World Heritage Sites

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The Turning Torso was designed by world famous Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava (some of whose work we’ve featured in the past), and represents part of a growing trend for elaborately warped and twisted “torqued towers“.

In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park the new M.H. De Young Museum was completed in October 2005 – replacing the original building that had been damaged in an earthquake. To prevent damage to the new building, it can move almost a metre thanks to a system of sliding plates and fluid dampers. It’s also entirely clad in copper, which will eventually oxidize, taking on a green colour reflective of the surrounding vegetation.

From many places around the park, the most striking feature of the building is the 44 metre Hamon Tower, the impressive twist of which can be clearly seen from both an aerial and ground-level point of view.

Tower designers aren’t just rotating their towers either – although still under construction in Google’s images, the China Central Television Headquarters building was completed in December 2008, and its design almost defies belief. Especially when you consider that this area is also prone to earthquakes!

Technically the CCTV building isn’t a traditional tower, but rather a “continuous loop of six horizontal and vertical sections covering 381,000 square metres of floor space”. This is probably best summed up by the building’s local nickname – “Big Shorts”.

There are several other torqued towers around the world that are either in planning, or already under construction. However I wonder how many of them will be delayed or cancelled due to the current economic climate?

• 1 World Trade Center, New York City, (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), will have a roof set at 45° from the bottom.
• The Infinity Tower, Dubai, will feature a 90° twist like the Turning Torso, but will be nearly twice the height.
• The Chicago Spire, Chicago, also designed by Santiago Calatrava, will be 160 metres taller than the Sears Tower.
• The Burj al-Taqa, Dubai, will feature a twisted hyperboloid design, and will generate all its own energy.

Finally, check out the totally insane Signature Towers and equally ludicrous Dubai Towers Dubai which are both planned for construction in Dubai.

See the amazing skyscraperpage.com for more jaw dropping future skyscrapers.

Thanks to stephan and Vectoor.

Locations: California, China, Sweden / Categories: Buildings, Shadows, Towers

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Today about 3km of the Northern loop are currently in use¹, but around 7km will be ready by next year. As well as the track itself, Google’s images let us see the absolutely massive wind turbines that form part of the operator’s vision to be the most environmentally friendly racing facility of its type in the world.

Although it’s far from complete at this stage, these images do also let us begin to see the profile of the Southern Loop, which will apparently be ready for “tarmac installation” next year, but won’t be ready for racing until 2012. As this diagram demonstrates, when finished the two loops will be joined, allowing drivers to race around one complete circuit totalling 28km.²

The land on which the track is being built belongs to a company called Nordkalk, and as the imagery makes quite obvious, it used to be a large limestone quarry. It looks like production of limestone is still in full flow here, judging by the activity going on at the nearby lake, and in fact much of the crushed stone needed for building the circuit was provided by the mining operation.

Gotland Ring does have a Wikipedia page, but it currently reads like a badly translated press release. Perhaps a kindly Swede could do a better job of translating the key points from the official site?

Locations: Sweden / Categories: Islands, Other Vehicles, Stadiums and Sport, Structures

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The yellow floating crane to the northwest took part in the dismantling process, which you can see from the ground in these numerous photos. You can also see the Kockums crane at its new South Korean home in this photo.

And while we’re on a roll with the big cranes scroll a few screens east for the largest floating crane in the world.

Many thanks to Lars Persson & Rickard Jensen

Locations: Sweden / Categories: Structures

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According to what I’ve read, the island is also a biological experiment to see how nature will develop on the island. Currently a bunch of plants have already spread to the island, some are very rare.

Thanks: Roland, Thomas, breakbeat, jensflorian, Marcus Rangell, Simone, Yann & Martin

Locations: Denmark, Sweden / Categories: Bridges

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Thanks: Michael, Alexander Danling & Sputnik

Locations: Sweden / Categories: Stadiums and Sport

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